The first time I saw the ocean, I was 19, at a distant family member’s wedding on the California coast. The first time I saw the Atlantic, I was 30. The friend who picked me up at the Boston airport at midnight exited the freeway and pulled up to an empty beach so I could stare at the dark waves.

I didn’t experience open water, out of sight of land, until 2021, on my way to Nantucket, Massachusetts, to do research for my novel, Wild and Distant Seas.

All this is to say: It’s weird that I wrote a book that’s obsessed with the ocean.

But maybe it’s not too surprising. Growing up in Moscow, Idaho, and Laclede, Idaho—a town so small that even other people from North Idaho have no idea it exists—I spent my childhood imagining what else was out there.

I’d climb the ridge above my grandparents’ house, scale the huge rock at the top, and look out over the mountains, wondering how far I could see. Sometimes I took a book (my preferred method of adventure).

As a teenager, I hung a world map above my bed, where I could fall asleep thinking of the possibilities. I kept the map over the years, even as the possibilities seemed to shrink, even when people would ask if I was ever going to get out of Idaho and I’d look at my small children and my debts and my meandering career and think, How am I supposed to imagine that?

But it was in Idaho that Wild and Distant Seas came to life. I completed my master’s degree (slowly) while working for the University of Idaho, and in my final class we read Moby-Dick.

Walking to campus one day, I thought of an idea for a story about the only woman with a significant speaking role in Melville’s beast of a novel. I daydreamed about her looking out at the sea from her Nantucket inn—2,900 miles from Idaho, 169 years earlier in time—and came up with the sentence that essentially remained the first line of Wild and Distant Seas: “It took me some time to appreciate the smell of dead fish.”

As the story became the draft of a novel, and the novel sprawled across the world, I would stop at times and spiral into panic. Who on earth am I to write this? What do I even know? I’m a kid from Idaho.

To get going again, I’d remind myself of two things. One, that Melville himself didn’t visit Nantucket until after Moby-Dick’s publication. And two, that being a kid from Idaho had given me gifts of desire and imagination. I didn’t have to write what you know. I prefer the adage write what you’re curious about.

And hadn’t I always been curious about everything?

At some point, though, I decided the story had to come back to Idaho. The book wouldn’t be fully mine unless it contained both my daydreams and my waking life.

The fourth narrator in Wild and Distant Seas, a 14-year-old named Annie, spends her childhood rambling around Europe before her mother drags her to Moscow, Idaho, in 1902. As she steps off the train into a muddy little village that claims to be a university town, Annie decides that she’s been trapped in the middle of nowhere.

I’ve gone through long stretches where I felt utterly stuck in Idaho. But the experience of writing these scenes reminded me, too, of the beauty of living in a place that gives you endless hills and mountains to look out on with wonder: about what’s beyond them and what’s in them.

Publishing Wild and Distant Seas and sharing it with readers brought me to the Atlantic and Pacific coasts in a single year for the first time, and to the Great Lakes for the first time. But the best place it’s brought me is home.

It’s thrilling to have strangers tell me they enjoyed my book. But it’s meant so much more to have my friends and neighbors, old classmates and past teachers and former students, my parents and grandmothers, all these people I’ve grown to know and love over 39 years in Idaho, read my book. It’s incredible to walk into my beloved local bookstore, Book People of Moscow, and see Wild and Distant Seas on the shelf. The Pacific Northwest Book Award is one of the highest honors I could ever imagine.

Thank you, to everyone who has read Wild and Distant Seas, for allowing an Idaho kid to take you on an adventure across the sea, around the world—and back home.

Book People of Moscow, ID is proud to host Tara Karr Roberts for her Pacific Northwest Book Award celebration on Thursday, February 13, 2025 at 5:00. 

Watch this site for more information about the Pacific Northwest Book Award winner events hosted by independent bookstores around the region. 

NWbooklovers posts original essays from this year’s award winners as featured posts in January and February. You can enjoy essays from past winners of the PNBA Book Award in our archive. 

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